I'm having a problem with drips of ink on my canvas prints on my Epson 11880. The drips tend to occur when I am running larger print jobs; say over twenty 3 x 4-foot prints at a time. The drips appear on random locations at random times. It is intermittent, but once it starts to occur, it will often ruin every other print.

The only solution I have found is to slow down printing. If I wait an hour between sending prints I don't see the problem. That is very inconvenient, but it seems to work.

Have you ever heard of this? Do you know of any way to stop this problem? Why would this occur on canvas and not paper? Only rarely to I see drips on my paper prints.I've talked with Epson tech support and they have not found a solution.

I have seen this problem on both my Epson printers and my Canon printer.My guess is, its a small piece of debris on the bottom of the print head that collectsink to the point where it finally drips off.

Running a cleaning cycle sometimes helps. The wiper blade will wipe the print headand sometimes clear the debris. Increasing the platten gap usually helps.When it gets bad I have resorted to the moist paper towel under the print head trick,which so far has fixed the issue every time.

"Try widening the platen gap"I've done that. By going from a normal platen gap to a wide platen gap I stopped getting head strikes. But it did nothing for the ink drips. Head strikes have a different look to them. They look more like a smudge. It looks like they've been wiped and because of that the texture of the canvas is partially revealed.

"Running a cleaning cycle sometimes helps."My concern is that cleaning cycles are actually making it worse. I'm thinking the drips are being triggered by too much ink going through the system. As I said this only occurs during large runs of prints on canvas. I don't see this when I only print two or three prints. Oddly enough, I rarely see it on paper prints, even when I'm doing a large number of prints at once.

I had AUTO NOZZLE CHECK set to ON: PERIODICALLY (which is the default).I find that when I ran large jobs of canvas that nozzle checks and cleanings were occurring between almost every job. When I checked the nozzles by printing the nozzle check pattern it often looked fine even though the printer was detecting a problem.

I'm now experimenting with having AUTO NOZZLE CHECK set to OFF and printing nozzle checks every two or three prints to see when I really need a cleaning cycle. By combining that with sending no more than one canvas print to the printer every hour the drips have improved dramatically. But that is very inconvenient when printing large orders.

I should mention that I've seen this problem on all four of 11880s that I've owned. I don't see it at first, it is only after several large orders of canvas prints. I should also mention that I use ImagePrint to send the jobs to the printer. The canvas I'm using is the 44 and the 60-inch rolls of Epson Premium Canvas Matte.

We had this periodically on our 9800 on Epson Satin canvas. 95% sure the cause was the head wiper being covered in gunk - cleaned around the capping station, wiped the wiper, and have not had any problems subsequently. We tend to only use the 9800 with Imageprint for the canvas, so it does have the potential to generate a fair amount of dirt from the cutter.Tended to be particularly the magenta that dropped, or at least, that was what stood out most.

Same exact problem.. but different printer. I have this on a Canon iPF6100. Just as you say, it seems to happen on canvas but hardly on paper. Slowing down my printing so there is a 1 second pause between each pass seems to solve it, but then the printing time is so much longer. Here are some pics.

1) I've never experienced this issue with my 11880 and I mostly print on canvas. I've printed on Epson Exhibition Matte, Canson Artist WR, Fredrix 901WR and now I'm using Hahnemuhle Daguerre 100% for my canvas.

2) I've used both the canned profiles and my own custom profiles made with my i1Pro.

3) You are most likely not experiencing head strikes as you would most likely hear them and you would get smudges and not drops of ink.

4) When you say several large orders of large prints, how many is several? On a couple of print jobs I've printed almost 2 rolls of 60" wide canvas.

5) Have you tried printing on any other canvas because quite honestly I switched pretty quickly away from the Epson Exhibition Matte due to real quality control issues. Perhaps other people are luckier than I with the Epson canvas but I found defects on more square feet than I thought acceptable.